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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#511

Post by jhancock »

I'm not a skeptic, but I keep LLMs on a short leash.

This is a thoughtful article. Thanks `tptacek

My LLM use is: 1 - tedious stuff; web pages interacting with domain back end. 2 - domain discovery.

In a recent adventure, I used Claude 4 to tease out parameters in a large graph schema. This is a combination of tedium and domain discovery (it's not my graph and I'm not a domain expert). In the first day, Claude uncovered attributes and relations no other LLM or Google search uncovered. And it worked!! The next day, I allowed it to continue. After a bit, results didn't pass the sniff test.

I checked into details of Claude's thinking: it decided to start making up schema attributes and inventing fallback queries on error with more made up attributes. It was "conscious" of its decision to do so. By the time I caught this, Claude had polluted quite a bit of code. Sure, plenty of well placed git commits helped in rolling back code...but it's not quite that simple..over the many git commits were sprinkled plenty of learnings I don't want to toss. It took another two days of carefully going through the code to pull out the good stuff and then roll things back. So now I'm at day five of this adventure with cleaned up code and notes on what we learned.

I suspect continual improvements on tooling will help. Until then, it's a short leash.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#512

Post by wraptile »

jhancock wrote: post #511

I'm not a skeptic, but I keep LLMs on a short leash. This is a thoughtful article. Thanks `tptacek My LLM use is: 1 - tedious stuff; web pages interacting with domain back end. 2 - domain discovery. In a recent adventure, I used Claude 4 to tease out parameters in a large graph schema. This is a combination of tedium and domain discovery (it's not my graph and I'm not a domain expert). In the first day, Claude uncove…

Domain discovery is so underrated. LLMs remove so much friction that makes everything so incredibly accessible.

If LLMs couldn't do anything else then that alone would still warrant an invention of a century sticker.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#513

Post by grafmax »

> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own.

If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs.

The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling prophecy. Our workplaces depend on us. We have the power to put the brakes on whatever our employers are up to by organizing and striking.

Tech workers should be organizing to prepare for the profit-taking moves management has in store for us as the tech gets better and better. If LLMs really live up to their potential, It’s just going to get worse from here.

They keep bragging about how many people are going to lose their jobs and they mean us. They’re bragging about firing us! It’s foolish for us to sit idly by while we are the ones who make them their profits.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#514

Post by mrheosuper »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

I disagree.

Self-hosting has always have a lot of drawbacks compared with commercial solutions. I bet my self-host file server has worse reliability than Google Drive, or my self-host git server has worse number of concurrent user than github.

It's one thing you must accept when self-host.

So when you self-host LLM, you must either accept a drop in output quality, or spend a small fortune on hardware

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#515

Post by dbalatero »

mrbungie wrote: post #245

You know what's nuts? How so many articles about supporting LLMs and against skeptics are so full of fallacies and logical inconsistencies like strawmans, false dichotomies, appeals to emotion and to authority when they have supposedly almost AGI machines to assist them in their writing. They could at least do a "please take a look at my article and see if I'm commiting any logical fallacies" prompt iteration session…

Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT and it came up with 30+ fallacies + examples. I'm sure some is hallucinated, but woof:

https://chatgpt.com/share/683e62ed-e118-800f-a404-bd49bec799...

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#516

Post by nickysielicki »

TheRoque wrote: post #185

One of the biggest anti LLM arguments for me at the moments is about security. In case you don't know, if you open a file with copilot active or cursor, containing secrets, it might be sent to a server a thus get leaked. The companies say that if that file is in a cursorignore file, it won't be indexed, but it's still a critical security issue IMO. We all know what happened with the "smart home assistants" like Alexa…

You write your secrets to disk?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#517

Post by Aeolun »

grafmax wrote: post #513

> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling…

> We have the power to put the brakes on whatever our employers are up to by organizing and striking.

You have the power to do that in your own isolated environment, but it's a delaying tactic at best.

This whole thing is as inevitable as TV, smartphones, airplanes, tanks or guns. Everyone will use them, because they're so much better than anything that came before that there's no competition for the same use cases.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#518

Post by kyle-rb »

>> but you have no idea what the code is

> Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?

> You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM.

Loved this bit. In a professional setting, any code — AI-written or not — should be read by at least two people, the submitter and the reviewer.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#519

Post by shlant »

bccdee wrote: post #467

To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisio…

OP: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-its-bad-at-rust

> (from https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/)

looks inside

complaining about Rust code

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#520

Post by creata »

thetwentyone wrote: post #157

The author posits that people don't like using LLMs with Rust because LLMs aren't good with Rust. Then people would migrate towards languages that do will with LLMs. However, if that were true, then Julia would be more popular since LLMs do very well with it: https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/chatgpt-performs-better-...

Does the linked study actually check that the LLM solves the task correctly, or just that the code runs and terminates without errors? I'm bad at reading, but the paper feels like it's saying the latter, which doesn't seem that useful.
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